


We Built Monuments To Each Other

by deandratb



Category: The Doctor Blake Mysteries
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-25
Updated: 2018-01-25
Packaged: 2019-03-09 08:03:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13477197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deandratb/pseuds/deandratb
Summary: After a lifetime spent as best friends, their art holds the key to bringing them together.Handing him the book, standing there while he gripped its edges and stared, was cracking open a lifetime of secrets and laying them bare. She accepted that, and braced for the worst.





	We Built Monuments To Each Other

**Author's Note:**

> For [a-tardis-at-downton](http://a-tardis-at-downton.tumblr.com/), who provided the title.

Lucien was a novelist, writing contemporary fiction about friendship and love and family life. His income was modest, but comfortable, though his hometown and the people in it considered him scandalous--the eccentric writer who dropped tidbits of local gossip in his stories and didn’t seem to care what anybody thought.

Jean was an artist, especially fond of dreamy watercolor landscapes and portraits in oil. She had to live lean to survive on what her paintings brought in, but she worked while she raised her sons, and felt like she was suffocating the entire time. At least now she felt free.

Lucien and Jean became friends after his mother died, palling around the schoolyard with Matthew Lawson, imaginations running wild. The three of them grew up together, building an extended family where theirs fell short.

Matthew began making mildly sarcastic comments in Year 10 about how annoying it was to watch Lucien **not** make a move already, but Lucien just rolled his eyes and insisted that Jean was his best friend. He didn’t like her that way.

Every one of his novels featured a strong, slightly tragic woman who demanded respect from the emotionally damaged man she loved. Several of his heroines had glossy chestnut curls and fierce blue eyes. 

Lucien didn’t realize it until he was in his 40s, until Jean had already married Christopher and lost him to a drunk driver and lifted her chin and carried on...but he had loved her, been **in** love with her, for most of his life.

Of course, she didn’t feel the same. She still fell into silent tears some evenings after they got a little sloppy on wine, whispering to him her fear that if only she hadn’t picked a fight, if only she hadn’t argued with Christopher that night, he wouldn’t have been at that intersection at exactly the wrong moment.

No matter what Lucien said, Jean believed she was a little bit responsible for the death of her husband. And as it haunted her, it was obvious that Christopher was her great love. So Lucien kept his mouth shut, and kept writing, channeling his feelings into his work.

He refused to do anything that might ruin their friendship. She was too important to him, to risk losing her. Matthew, tall and proud in his police uniform, had long since given up trying to knock sense into Lucien’s thick skull--but he watched the two of them with a smirk sometimes, waiting. 

Jean was pretty sure it began for her the moment they met. She didn’t exactly believe in love at first sight, but the sad boy with the quick grin made her want to give him a cuddle and coax out a laugh, and even before she was old enough to truly understand the words of the poets, her heart was his.

But Lucien Blake was a mess, a complicated puzzle whose feelings for her were sweet and protective and almost brotherly. Jean felt like a girlish cliche, pining after her best friend when he didn’t even see her. 

And she did love Christopher, deeply. He gave her her boys. She missed him every day.

If a traitorous part of her heart never stopped loving Lucien, there wasn’t anything she could do about that. There wasn’t anything she **wanted** to do about it; he was hers, in so many ways that mattered. And even though he was oblivious, she was his. 

After her sons were grown and moved away, after she was able to focus solely on her art, Jean’s paintings entered a third act along with her. She painted fewer landscapes, no longer dreaming of beautiful places she would never see.

She sketched Lucien in charcoal, from every angle, drawing him in profile, drawing him at his desk, brow furrowed while he wrote...drawing him exactly the way he looked the moment she realized her heart was healing, the moment she realized that she had room to love both her lost husband and the lost boy she’d raced across courtyards. 

Jean used those sketches to create oil paintings she would show no one--still dreaming of beauty that would never be hers; but now those dreams were centered around a stubborn man with unruly blonde hair and stormy eyes, rather than Paris or Rome.

Matthew, happily married to an eccentric genius he met late in life, was just plain sick of watching the both of them sigh and stare and say absolutely nothing. He loved them both like his own family, and they were being idiots. So in the end, it was Matthew who gave them the nudge they needed.

“What’s this?” He snatched the sketch out of her lap before Jean had a chance to protest. 

“Matthew Lawson, you give that back right now!” Even standing on her toes, she couldn’t grab it back herself, not with Matthew holding it over his head like the obnoxious younger brother he had become for her over the years. Some things they would apparently never grow out of, Jean decided with exasperation.

“Can’t do it,” he replied, staring up at the drawing. He grinned. “Well, isn’t this a likeness?”

Matthew ducked under Jean’s arm and dodged her, landing hard next to Lucien on Jean’s couch. “It looks just like you,” he told his friend, passing the paper his way. “Check it out.”

Sitting at his laptop, Lucien needed a second to leave his characters behind. His hero was fighting the local town council for the right to start his own business, while he slipped slowly into love with the gentle neighbor who had volunteered to help run his campaign.

“What’s this?” Staring down at the paper, Lucien dimly heard Jean sigh and call Matthew a word he wouldn’t have expected to hear from her soft pink lips. “Jean, you drew this?”

The portrait was unmistakable, with Lucien sitting in a park, head thrown back in laughter. There was such detail in it--the slight curl to the hair at the nape of his neck, the way his hands seemed to be in motion even while he was sitting still.

Obviously, he knew Jean was talented. He’d actually gone with her to her first drawing class, out of curiosity and for the fun of getting to do it together. Lucien had discovered a mild ability of his own--he could still draw a reasonably recognizable portrait.

But Jean had eclipsed him, eclipsed everyone in the class, as though all she’d needed was the right tools and some encouragement. So of course he knew she could draw well, and paint beautifully. 

She had just never drawn **him.**

There was something deeply moving in the light pencil marks, the way they flowed together to create a vision of what Jean saw of the world. What she saw of him--well, it was beautiful.

Lucien tore his gaze away to search hers, trying to make sense of this development. Had she drawn him on a whim? Had she done it before?

He didn’t think anyone saw him this way, full of life and energy but also sorrow. Jean saw straight through him...maybe she always had, with that artist’s eye.

But if so, if she knew him this well, had she figured it out? He would be mortified, Lucien realized, if for all these years he’d not only loved Jean but done so with her full--and unreciprocated--awareness. He couldn’t bear her pity.

Jean returned his stare, shoulders back as though she was preparing herself for a blow. She didn’t **look** like she pitied him. It took him a moment, but when Lucien was able to put a name to the expression on her face, it looked rather like...fear.

“Yes,” she said, with a flick of her eyes toward Matthew and back. “Yes, I drew it.”

“It’s so...”

“Oh, it’s just a drawing,” Jean replied, waving away his awestruck tone. “It’s nothing, really.”

She crossed the room and nudged Matthew over so she could sit between them, trying to figure out how best to get the sketch back without making it seem important. She needed Lucien to stop staring at it---to stop looking at her like he had never seen her before. 

Jean was able to be his friend and maintain a proper distance because when he looked at her, it wasn’t quite like he saw her. But she had never been very good at hiding her emotions, and she didn’t need him to start paying attention now.

“Jeanie, it’s amazing.” He reached for her hand, and held it. “I mean, well, look at it. The way you captured me in the moment, the finer points. It’s so full of--”

Lucien stopped speaking, his jaw dropping a little while Jean frowned at the sudden silence.

There it was. Finally. Matthew grinned to himself and left the room, knowing they wouldn’t notice. 

It hit Lucien all at once, with the force of an earthquake. He felt it in his bones, everything shifting. _It’s so full of **love,**_ he thought, tracing his fingertips along her pencil strokes. It was in every line. 

It was right there in front of him.

And it was in her eyes, when Jean pulled her hand back and stood, pacing to the other side of the room. How had he not noticed it?

“So much fuss over a little drawing,” she said, her voice wavering. “You’d think you’d never seen yourself before.”

“Jean.” Lucien’s voice, so uncharacteristically serious, dropped to a register that made her heart beat faster. “Please. Come sit down.”

Her hesitation was brief, but it spoke volumes, now that Lucien was listening. “All right.”

He took her hand again, running his fingers over it absently as he talked. “I’ve never seen myself like that, the way you see me. I didn’t know you draw me. Is there more?”

Jean might have wanted to protect herself, and her heart, but she couldn’t lie. Not to him. Not when he was watching her with those warm, sincere eyes...and her answer felt essential.

“Yes.” She bit her lip, and took a risk. “Yes, there are more. Would you like to see them?”

Lucien smiled. “Very much.”

It was a foolish decision, Jean knew, getting up and retrieving one of her sketchbooks and opening the cover to let him see the charcoal drawing. The perspective study showed Lucien turned three-quarters away, focusing on the slope of his shoulder, the curve of his ear, and the way his chin tilted downward with the slightest hint of a smile.

Handing him the book, standing there while he gripped its edges and stared, was cracking open a lifetime of secrets and laying them bare. She accepted that, and braced for the worst. 

Lucien turned the page, and found a funny little sketch of himself asleep at his desk, complete with a row of z’s floating over his head while he slumbered. He chuckled, and tilted the book in Jean’s direction. “That’s so clever!”

Moving to the next page, he found a portrait of himself, staring straight ahead. He glanced quickly at Jean before thumbing his way to the center of the book and opening it at random. 

This, too, was a drawing of Lucien--playing rugby, grass-stains on his shirt and a bruise above one eye.

Flipping further along, he watched the pages fly by, and let out a sharp breath. “Are they...” 

Jean blinked hard against the tears that welled up without her permission, and waited.

“Are they all of me?”

She nodded, looking past him to the painting of a lake that she’d had hung above her couch. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“I draw what interests me. What I feel.” Jean lifted a shoulder. “I’m tired of drawing city skylines and grassy knolls.”

She waited for the question, the one she wasn’t ready to answer. If Lucien asked, she would tell him the truth. Damn the consequences; it was too late to go back now.

He set the sketchbook aside, tapping his fingers against his knee for a few moments before he spoke. “Do you remember my third novel?”

Startled by the change of subject, Jean narrowed her eyes when she replied, “Of course I do.”

“What did you think of Frances?”

“The love interest? I thought she was delightful. Witty, passionate, brave. She knew how to put your hero in his place, kindly. You know all this,” Jean reminded him. “We talked about that book for weeks.”

“Did you notice that I based her on a real person?”

“No.” Jean tilted her head, too curious now to stay worried. “I remember thinking your hero was a bit like you, for good and for bad...but Frances didn’t remind me of anyone we know. Who inspired her?”

Lucien stood, chuckling as he crossed the few inches that separated them. “Jean...my darling, astonishingly blind Jean. She was **you.** ”

“Me.”

She thought it over, but couldn’t make sense of it. “No, surely not. Lucien--she was so smart! And if I recall correctly, at one point you described her as ‘a singularly beautiful creature, the kind of woman who could launch ships with the quirk of her lips.’ If you’re trying to tease me, I’m telling you now, this is a cruel way of doing it.”

“I assure you,” Lucien said quietly, “I am completely serious. Frances was inspired by you...heavily.”

He reached out to rest his hands on her hips, and pull her a little bit closer. “I couldn’t get you out of my head, so I let everything that I love about you spill onto those pages. And because of it, Frances is my favorite character that I’ve written so far.”

“Why are you telling me this now?” Jean’s fingers curled around his wrists and held on. 

“Well, I saw myself in your drawings, and I realized how much trust there was, in you giving them to me. You put your heart in your work, you know? You always have.”

Jean blushed, but nodded, watching his face carefully. 

“I understand that, because I’m the same way. And for the last few years, all the ink I’ve spilled, all those manuscripts I’ve turned into books you keep on that shelf over there...” 

Lucien smiled. “Every one of those stories has been a love letter, to you.”

He let out a hiss of breath when her nails dug into his skin. 

“Oh, god, I’m sorry!” Jean’s hand flew to her mouth. “I didn’t mean to--”

“It’s fine.” Lucien was still holding her, and he let his hands roam up her back then, watching her eyes shut as she arched into his touch a little. “I know I surprised you.”

“You really did.” She was still having trouble processing it, such a casual confession that could change the course of both their lives. 

“Well, you surprised me first.” He cupped her cheek, stroking his thumb along her jawline, enjoying the way Jean’s eyes darkened as they focused on him. 

“Jean?”

“Yes, Lucien?”

“Can I kiss you?”

She blinked. “You kiss me all the time.”

“Yes, affectionately...as friends. But there’s a line, a deliberate line, that means something if we cross it. It would be hard to go back, maybe impossible.”

He paused to take a breath, clearly not done, and Jean took pity on the both of them. “Oh, save it for your next novel,” she told him firmly.

Jean lifted a hand to the back of his neck and stood on her toes just a little, cutting off his reply with her mouth.

Despite all the years of uncertainty, or maybe because of it, she had no hesitation left. She poured herself into the kiss, Lucien’s mouth hot against hers and hands tangling in her hair.

When he had to pull away for air, he grinned and kissed her forehead. “So, I guess that line is behind us, now.”

“Miles back,” Jean agreed, taking his hand. “And good riddance to it.”

“What now?”

“Well...” She looked up at him from under her eyelashes, a hint of teasing in her voice. “You could tell me which other characters you based on me.”

Lucien raised his eyebrows. “If I do, can I see the rest of that sketchbook?”

Jean leaned in for a long, languorous kiss. “If you do...I’ll show you the paintings.”

His face lit up. “Paintings?”

“That’s right.”

He followed her to the bookshelf where she kept his novels, and started pulling out a selection. “Are any of them nudes?”

Jean laughed, a light, rolling sound that Lucien hoped to hear every day for the rest of his life.

“Not yet.”


End file.
